Hello guys,
I'm a guy from Belgium and I have been scammed by "Global Direct Equities LLC".
www.globaldirectequities.com
I paid 5250 USD for 150 Facebook shares @ 35 USD for the IPO offering.
I had contact with two guys, Paul Young and Kevin Mulholland.
They seemed trustworthy and I have send me a link to check the company:
with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
***Finra***
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Go to the following link:
FINRA - List of Members - G
I just checked their domain name and it has been registerd in February 2012 in the Philippines.
The address for Global Direct Equities LLC on the finra.org website isn't the same as the address on their website so I guess they used the name of the real broker company to mislead people.
This is the address underneath their mails:
Paul Young
Junior Consultant
Global Direct Equities LLC.
61 BROADWAY - SUITE 1915, NEW YORK, NY 10006 Contact Number: +1 347 201 9594
[email protected] www.globaldirectequities.com
Is there something I can do or can I say goodbye to my money?
Thank you in advance for your reply
Best regards
It all depends on when all this happened. If it happened no longer than a week ago, you might be lucky and freeze the beneficiary bank accounts via the MAREVA route. This will cost you a bit in fees, depends on how serious you are in pursuing these criminals. Here is something on Mareva:
A Mareva letter is a procedure for freezing assets that have been transferred to a beneficiaries bank, wherever that is, until resolution.
A Mareva letter places a bank on notice that they may face accessory liability in the event of transfer or disposal of assets that have been illegally transferred to fraudulent individuals.
Mareva letters have been successful , in a number of cases, in returning assets to those individuals who would have been defrauded.
You are advised to contact a solicitor or lawyer to draw up a Mareva letter if you think you have been defrauded, certainly within days of the transfer of funds taking place.
The letter requires the following information:
Name of boiler room
‘Sales person’
Beneficiary bank
Name of account
Swift code
Account number
Transaction reference number
For further information on the Mareva letter go to
www.martinkenney.com/pdf/marevaletter.pdf This document basically spells out the fact that banks have a duty of care and should respond to a Mareva letter. In time this will be the default procedure. Boiler room individuals will respond to this by withdrawing funds transferred almost immediately, so don't hold your breath on this one.
However, you can apply pressure on banks in Belgium, by exposing their lack of procedures for spotting money laundering, as that is what it amounts too. If the recipients were drug barons , they would have been nipped in the bud long ago. You need to replicate the following for your banks in Belgium:
As of April 2012, none of the UK banks, (apart from HSBC Holdings) which includes Santander, RBS, Barclays, Lloyds TSB Banking Group, NationalWestminster, Northern Rock, Co-operative, Sainsburys and Tesco banks appear to have informed their customers by letter about boiler room operations. Only HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds TSB mention boiler room fraud on their websites. RBS, Santander, HSBC and NatWestminster mention 419 advanced fee fraud on their sites but most people do not equate boiler room fraud with 419 advanced fee fraud. Considering the losses experienced by their customers, banks are doing nothing to safeguard their customers against the threat of boiler room fraud. My first hand experience of this fraud involved Santander Bank.
A recent trend has been to send monies to UK based banks, rather than foreign banks in places such as Spain and USA. This is just a ploy to legitimise the transaction. If anyone has recently sent monies to a UK bank do the right thing and name the branch it was sent too.
Hope this helps anyone to recover monies lost.
friday76